by Gore Vidal
“That was better than I could do.” Doris was impressed, as Peter had intended her to be. “Was that Bowra’s translation?”
“I think so. It’s flat enough. He had no ear. But I like ‘an unlucky twist of thought.’ Diana and I saw a good deal of him one summer back in … when Sardinia first opened up. He was a friend of friends. Grand friends. Those old English dons seldom missed a trick. I never learned Greek.” Peter did not listen to Doris’s response.
Sturtevant’s ash-blond hair was windblown into a small haystack set atop a round, Mayan skull which meant Mongolian or, Peter rather hoped, possible Egyptian ancestry. “Are you going to join the party?” He was holding a silver cup of eggnog.
“I am,” said Doris, rising.
“I’ll be in presently. Sit down.” On the wall opposite Sturtevant was the framed cover of the Potsdam issue that had been the making of American Idea. Billy Thorne. Wooden leg. Ill-matched eyes. Unasked, the custodian perfunctorily flashed odd bits of information onto the screen. Peter asked the biographer if he had, as yet, netted this peculiar fish.
“No.” Sturtevant switched on the recorder. “I suspect Mr. Thorne’s dead. I was told that there’s an ex-wife who might know. So I tracked her down to a nursing home. She has Alzheimer’s. There’s no record of him after 1980.”
“We should try—you should try the Freedom of Information Act. I’m sure he has an imposing dossier. I’d be curious to know if he was actually CIA, or just a fellow …” The word fell off the screen. The custodian, taking a well-earned nap, hurriedly punched out “voyager,” which Peter irritably rejected, along with a dozen other wrong words. By the time “traveler” appeared, the need for any word was gone. Aunt Caroline had said that Eleanor Roosevelt had taken concentrated garlic pills every day of her life for memory. Should he?
“I’ve got a friend from Langley looking into it. Thorne also stayed close to Clay Overbury even though he and Aeneas never got on. Had Overbury become president instead of Kennedy, Thorne would have been a key player. He was known to be a great cross-puncher …”
At the thought of life in the real world, Sturtevant tended, like so many sheltered academics, to indulge in Darwinian metaphors and jock-style language. Peter suspected that “cross-puncher” was probably the wrong phrase but he was not about to ask his exhausted custodian to check it out. But “check it out” gave him unexpected pleasure. Obviously, he himself was still with it, with it. So much so that he did not hear Sturtevant’s question. All that he caught was the end: “… hope to solve the mystery?”
Peter stalled. “Mystery?” What was? Clay’s death? Yes.
“Aeneas knew more than he ever let on. But I could never get anything out of him. I know that Aeneas had fallen out with Clay the year before Clay’s death.”
The year before what? Peter’s normally slow pulse was beating faster. “Did Aeneas ever tell you why, exactly, he broke with Clay?”
“I came into his life long after. But you knew him then, knew him all along. From what you said last night, I assume it was over Rosamund. I mean Rosalind.”
Peter guiltily drank heavy cream and egg with cinnamon from the silver cup. “We saw very little of each other those last days. Obviously, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the Clay for President movement. I preferred Adlai Stevenson. Yes, he couldn’t make up his mind, but at least he had one to make up or not. I think Aeneas came to see me, to ask us to support Kennedy.”
In the chair beneath the Potsdam cover, a gray Aeneas materialized. He was nervous. He chewed on the stem of a pipe. No more cigarettes. Emphysema. “I suppose you’ll say, I told you so …”
Peter had been quietly smug. “I’m never so obvious. Anyway, you lasted longer with Clay than I thought you would. Jack Kennedy is much more your style.”
“I think he’s what we need now.” Aeneas twirled his wedding ring only, Peter had noticed with some surprise, he was wearing no ring at all: this was now an automatic gesture, like a tic.
“And what do we need now?”
“Energy. A new generation …”
“Yes. Yes. Everyone’s agreed. So we have a choice between two young men with rich fathers. Only Clay’s rich father is actually my rich father. On loan, you might say. Anyway, you’ve gone over to Kennedy …”
“I hope I can persuade you to do the same.”
“Don’t even try. I’m forever Stevenson’s man because he turned down both Clay and Jack to run with last time.”
“For Estes Kefauver!” Aeneas’s coughing fit filled, first, Peter’s memory and then merged into the noise of the party next door. Iris had opened the door.
“Time to shine,” she said. “Everyone’s waiting.”
With Sturtevant not quite clinging to him, Peter made his way into the party, where he was given, for no apparent reason other than longevity, a small but apparently sincere ovation.
Then Peter held court with the contributors that he knew. Thanks to the intensity of Aeneas’s early efforts, they still had the best arts section of any review, liberal or otherwise. “I think,” said Peter, quizzed on the subject by the stylized skeptic from the Washington Post, “that this is partly due to the fact that we keep politics, when not relevant, out of our reviews. We also keep on and on with those good critics who want to keep on and on with us.”
“That means,” said the man from the Post, “you must pay them better than the other magazines.” Peter chuckled; changed the subject. He was, of course, in Aunt Caroline’s debt for the salaries he could pay that others could not. But no one need know.
Over the fireplace someone had placed a banner with 2000 A.D. emblazoned in gold on red. Someone else had, predictably, tacked C.E. under the A.D. Much energy was spent conforming to ever-shifting fads in a language that each year lost more and more words, particularly useful irreplaceable ones.
Peter sat in a throne in front of the window that looked out on the backyard, now front yard to the modern annex, their miniature “publishers row.” Doris brought him people to talk to. He did not, he decided, regret in any way his life. Except for Diana, he missed none of those who had defected to death. Old people sobbing in graveyards struck him as either the height of hypocrisy or else of solipsism, since they were mourning nothing more than their own approaching change of estate.
Suddenly, a small dark-haired young man appeared. Peter had not seen him earlier, or ever before. “Mr. Sanford.” As they shook hands, Peter stared into a sharp intelligent face. Dark hazel eyes glittered beneath dark hair combed straight back from a brow which, due to youthful baldness, was higher than nature had intended. A white smile was framed by full lips. “A. B. Decker.” He identified himself. Peter recognized the name; found the face mysteriously familiar. “I am your something-or-other cousin, sir.”
“Emma’s son. Aunt Caroline’s grandson …”
“Great-grandson.”
The generations were sweeping over him like the great wave at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, that had nearly drowned him when he was six years old, a powerful memory that stimulated the custodian, unbidden, to roll some stock footage of a huge wave, as seen by a child, a great green collapsing white-laced wall that fell with a heavy crash upon him: flung him hard against the coarse sand of the beach. “You are the very image of …”
“Aaron Burr. I know. So people tell me, the few who know who he is.” The young man sat in the chair next to Peter.
“The last time I saw your grandmother Emma …”
“Was at the funeral of her real father. Senator Day.”
“You know everything?” Peter was mildly irritated not to be able to break so much sensational news to this supremely self-assured young man.
“A. B. Decker,” Peter repeated the name. “Aaron Burr Decker?”
“Yes. I was even assigned the name. I can’t think what nature is up to.”
“Or what your grandmother Emma was up to. Well, Burr started our nineteenth century off with a bang. He elected Jefferson president and himself vice preside
nt, and heir. How do you plan to start up our twenty-first century?”
A.B. laughed. “Nothing so historic. So fundamental. ABC TV has a new series—dialogues. With the old and the wise. I’ve got the green light for you and your old friend Gore Vidal to chat together.”
“Which one is old? Which one is wise?”
“You both are both. Two survivors of the now forever vanished twentieth century. ‘The American century.’ Can you tell from the way I just said that that I was putting quotes around it?”
“Now you mention it, yes. But at least you didn’t make quotation marks with your fingers on either side of your newly ironic face as the young like to do. I must say, I wish Henry Luce had been more tongue-in-cheek when he minted that bit of fool’s gold. Has Gore agreed?”
“If we come to Italy. Next month. Yes.”
Several lively journalists from the Internet from—what was it called? Saloon? Salon?—had arrived. He would have to play host. “Well, Italy was—is—part of our global empire. At least we won’t end up posing against the Jefferson Memorial.”
“Or standing in Arlington Cemetery.” This was sharp. Definitely a Burr.
“We are ancestral voices, prophesying …” Peter began.
“War?”
“No. That game could be over. For us, if not others.” For the entire twentieth century, from the sinking of the Maine to Serbia’s intolerable defiance, whenever American leaders could think of nothing else to do, war was the diversion of choice. But ever since conscription had been abandoned, few Americans now voluntarily chose to take up arms for their nation; they were also laying down ever sterner rules in order to ensure not only their physical safety but comfort as well. Under none of the traditional circumstances (particularly, war far from home in places hitherto unknown) were their lives to be put at risk either by an overwrought enemy with no sense of irony or by maladministered vaccinations. During the last of the century’s Balkan adventure, American bombers had flown so high above their targets that they had missed nearly everything of military consequence while doing considerable damage to random civilians in the way below.
“Since we have too much fire and nuclear power, I suspect we’ll leave the actual fighting to our third-world clients. Let them provide the evening news with rich luminous reds.”
A.B. grinned. “Let TV be our Colosseum and the third-worlders our gladiators? Say that to camera.”
“You say it.” The television reporters were starting to converge on Peter. He braced himself.
“Will you do the program?” A.B. asked. “Last week in February?”
A nameless yet familiar television face was now eye to eye with Peter; others joined them. Questions and Answers. Q and A. Most urgent of all the questions was whether or not the President’s wife would be elected to the Senate. Yes? No? Maybe? The journalists fired more names at him. He felt as if he were the wall against which various worthies were to be executed by a “World News from Washington” firing squad. Briefly, very briefly, the great subjects were addressed. The price of a campaign for president. The price of a winning campaign for president while, just under the surface of such dull trivia as foreign affairs and the public welfare, lurked those issues that would determine the leadership of nation and globe, drugs and adultery.
It was A.B. who changed the subject to something even more interesting to the questioners than the approaching presidential election. Television. Its role. Its power. To a man, the journalists praised the anchorperson who had, the day before, stayed on air to follow the sun for twenty-four—or was it forty-eight?—hours. Endurance was admired. The sameness of everything around the world was also duly noted, to Peter’s surprise. Were they really so observant? Somewhat timidly, he remarked upon last night’s apparent absence anywhere on earth of that mournful Scottish air “Auld Lang Syne.”
“Perhaps,” said A.B., “our century was one old acquaintance that no one wants to bring to mind, ever again.”
“But now that we’ve got to the morning after, will anyone from our time be remembered?” Since Peter could see that the most familiar of the television faces had a list of sure-to-be-immortal names to submit, he headed him off with, “Our President is said to be worrying about his place in history. It’s as if he had a reservation which might not be honored if the hotel changes management. But shouldn’t he really be wondering if the United States is going to be remembered? You know, for old time’s sake? Or for any other sake that comes to mind.”
Since none of the journalists had ever before encountered such a nonsensical question, Peter’s animating thought did not register. They instead continued to fire names at Peter-the-wall.
A.B. to the rescue. “What politician today, not just here but anywhere, is going to be remembered? It’s the global economy, stupid, as the President might be tempted to say now that we’ve got to the year 2000 in one piece and with the Dow Jones over ten thousand.”
Peter made his move. “Certainly, those of you who make the news—or those who hire you to create it—are literally history-makers, as William Randolph Hearst was the first to discover.”
“But who,” asked the best-known face, “would remember Hearst today if it weren’t for Orson Welles?”
“Arson who?” asked a puzzled latecomer to the old century.
Peter avoided the endless trap of who was who. And promptly crashed into a new one. “You are Shelley’s dream come true …” Shelley! Talk fast. Get swiftly free of that elephant pit. “You—the media—are what he wanted poets to be, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
This, happily, went unrecognized and unacknowledged; and emptied their corner of the room just as Peter’s smile gave out. He turned to A.B. “Yes. I’ll go to Italy … to … Rapallo?”
“Ravello.” The black eyes glittered like polished onyx. “That will be the true confrontation.”
“Do you think so?” Peter had his doubts.
“Yes. Time to come full circle.” A.B. led Peter to the street, where Dr. Sturtevant helped him into the car.
Old Vernon’s stoop was empty. So were the streets around the Capitol: a strangely empty New Year’s Day. An omen?
Dr. Sturtevant had had a great deal to think about since the previous evening. “Concerning Clay Overbury’s … uh, death …”
Peter now regretted his late-night appearance of candor. “What,” he shifted the subject, “was Aeneas’s theory?”
“If he had one, he never told me.” They passed the Commerce Building, whose basement contained the aquarium where Billy Thorne’s wartime coven of agents met in secret conclave. Then, slowly, the car’s driver took the long way around the cordoned-off White House area. Thanks to something called terrorism, officials lived under siege. Early in the present regime, the First Lady of the Land had complained to him that presidents were now prisoners of the Secret Service. “We’d be a lot happier, he told me, if the President lived in a bunker and only rode in a tank when he goes out. He wasn’t joking either.” Peter thought of President Roosevelt in his open car, being driven around the city with no guards to speak of, a lady beside him and a battered felt hat in hand to wave cheerily for his subjects. At this recollection, the inner custodian outdid himself. Unbidden, he superimposed upon FDR in his car another image: a golden godlike man wearing an elaborate crown.
“Pacal!” Peter exclaimed with delight. “That’s his name.”
“Whose name?”
“A Mayan emperor. They found his tomb at Palenque. In Central America. He lived almost a thousand years ago. Now that we can read what the Mayans wrote, we can bring him back to life for us. For those who are interested, of course.”
“You are—of course.” Sturtevant was staring at him intently. “Do you feel that history repeats itself?”
Peter was annoyed by the verb. Intellectuals were not meant to feel. They were meant to think. To imagine. To deduce. “I feel nothing except interest in the fact that there have been other empires before us in this part of the world an
d that Pacal’s people, in time, became too many and when they did, they devoured each other.”
“You feel … I mean you think that cannibalism will be our fate?”
Peter laughed. “There are many more ways of devouring one another than culinary and I’m quite sure that we’ll try them all out. Anyway, nothing ever really repeats itself except …” An acidic fireball in his stomach burst. “… my sainted mother’s eggnog.”
Dr. Sturtevant withdrew a bound manuscript from his briefcase. “I found this waiting for me at the Cosmos Club. Aeneas’s daughter was going through his papers and …”
Peter opened to the title page. The Golden Age. Subtitle, 1945–1950. He was aware that Sturtevant was watching him intently.
“Did you know about this?”
Peter nodded. “Aeneas was always threatening to write something along this line.”
“Was it really so short a time?”
“Well, he thought it was, obviously. I’m more interested to know if there ever was such a thing.” Peter suddenly thought of something. Randall Jarrell had written in that long-ago time: how, in the most glorious of golden ages, there would always be someone complaining about how yellow everything looked. He chuckled at the thought, which his biographer was plainly eager for him to share, but Peter was not about to break his rule, which was never, ever, demoralize with a joke the literal, the dogged Robert L. B. Sturtevant, Ph.D.
ON AIR
After an aggressively dismal winter, one now wakes to what at first looks to be spring but then, by misty noon, the cold sun goes, and the false spring with it. From my study window, the Gulf of Salerno is a battleship gray that exactly matches the sky except where the bright morning sun has burned an imprecise round hole in high clouds. The far shore of the gulf is enveloped in a gray mist that obscures the temples of Paestum rising from their field of artichokes. In Italo Calvino’s last book he describes refracted sun rays on the sea as “a sword of light” that seems to remain pointed toward the watching eye from every angle. This morning, the sword is more a highway of glittering spangles, connecting the seashore some four hundred meters beneath my window to the broad deep gulf that ends in a wall of gray nothingness. Silver sequins glittering against gray-black. Where have I seen this effect before?